Catching Up with Fragments and Cut-Outs

Automatic vs. Controlled

I love automatic work like left-handed drawings and a poem everyday. I lived automatic, mostly, until the point when I didn’t. When I think, doubt creeps in — automatic doesn’t have space for that.

I over thought last Thursday and ended up with nothing. So now, this Monday morning is catch up — delayed but not broken. I plucked a poem from many and let marks find their way. The creature in my last poem began as a specific somebody and morphed into a non-specific other, extracted from a hole in an old photograph, a hole where I once stood.

It is fitting that The Underlines found me, it being definitely winter now, my visible breath hovering over the white-dusted, colour-faded, skin-tingling landscape as I move from house to studio and back again.

The Underlines

In the time between
There is time between
To sit and set free
The nothingness that can ravage the spirit —
Sometimes we waste.
But go, go back and fetch the underlines.
You may need them.

31 January 2024 | Day 281

I want to re-read The Dark, Dark by Samantha Hunt, but I have a teetering stack of books I’ve not read, haunting. So I look to the underlines in response to this poem. Here are some from The Dark, Dark:

"What’s the difference between living and imagining?"

“In the middle of the night it’s easy to hate myself as much as the world hates me.”

“The hum keeps them warm even if they aren’t listening to the broadcast.’

“Soon there will be nothing left that is unknowable, unlit, and mysterious. There will be no more of the dark dark.”

Do you scribble in books, comment, communicate with the writer, the character?

I love this starting point for something new. Also, when I look at books I’ve marked up, it feels like evidence of my having been there, fully in, I exist, anyway. The more marked up the page, the more likely it is I was walking whilst reading. So much more enters and is processed that way. But here I’ll stop. A fragment in a fragment of an extraction. I’ve done it.

Happy Thursday last.

Winter’s Walk Lessens Winter’s Worry

I can see the white wisps of my breath this morning
over the white-dusted, colour-faded, skin tingling
landscape. As we walk we laugh and our bodies
warm. We shed layers we knew we wouldn’t need.
One of us peed in the woods and I didn’t expect it.
This, just after a Newton’s Cradle joke. Maybe we
will all be okay after all.

2 December 2024 | Day